Brian,
30, had been with his girlfriend for a couple of years when he finally got up
the nerve to pop the question. She said yes. "I took a shower. It was a Sunday.
We smoked dope. Then, I got a good hour of just—you know,"
he says. "It made me feel like I was on Vicodin. Just. Fucking. Good."

Brian's
question—"Could you lick my asshole?"—is one rarely posed aloud by the
heterosexual American male. But that doesn't mean he's not thinking it.
Whatever your preferred nomenclature—rimming, analingus, butt-munching,
salad-tossing—oral-anal contact remains a secret item on the straight guy's
sexual menu. Last year, Esquire asked 500 men, "During foreplay, what's
the one thing that you want more of from your current partner?" A sizable
minority—12 percent—replied that they privately desired more rim jobs, situating
them between the 43 percent of guys who wanted more fellatio and the 6 percent
who wanted "a little rough play."

And
while the survey didn't totally give rimming its due—avoiding basic
questions about frequency in the average male's bedroom—it was surprising that it
was offered up as an acceptable option. While American men are increasingly
prying open their girlfriends' back doors, most aren't talking about their
assholes. They'll watch porn stars investigate every female orifice in
seemingly limitless fashion, but fantasies of their own anal action are usually
unmentionable, for reasons that have more to do with masculine pride than
pleasure.

"We
carry a lot of shame around our anuses," explains Charlie Glickman, a sex
educator and the author of The Ultimate Guide to Prostate Pleasure: Erotic Exploration for Men and Their Partners. "It's a shame that
starts when we're in diapers," and sticks around once we're housebroken. According
to Glickman (who is bisexual), even as adults, "We look for a reason to justify
the taboo. We say it's disgusting. We say it's dirty. We say it's gross."

And we
say it's gay. Though all men are sitting on the same equipment, the male
American ass is still perceived as a homosexual playground. When Glickman
surveyed 100 heterosexual couples to learn about their biggest reservations
around anal play, they asked, "Is this going to hurt?" and "Is this going to
get messy?" But they also wondered, "Is this going to make me gay?'" Their paranoia
reflects the "idea that if you receive anal stimulation, you're taking on the
woman's role," says Glickman. "You're being dominated. You're losing masculine
status."

Gay
rimmers disagree. A 2011 study of nearly 25,000 gay males found that 25.4 percent had eaten ass on their most
recent sexual encounter, and 26.1 percent had received. "It's a part of my
everyday sex life," says Michael, a 26-year-old in Long Beach. "I've never met
a man who refused to give or receive a rim job," regardless of his identity as
top or a bottom.

Michael
reasons that rim jobs might be more common among gays because they are "a
logical precursor to anal sex." But they also just feel good. Psychological roadblocks
to butt play mean that men who opt out are missing out, pure and simple. The
anus has "got all of this exquisite sensitivity—it's similar to the nerves in
your lips," Glickman says. When licked, "It kind of tickles," Michael adds. "But
it also stimulates other erogenous zones, like my penis and my nipples. It's
the whole body package." The feminist porn director Tristan Taormino agrees. "Why should fags have all the fun?" she wondered in a 2001 Village Voice column on the subject. "The asshole is the
most democratic of all orifices—we all have one!"

To normalize rimming among straight
people, like Taormino suggests, a first step might be to re-contextualize the
activity as just another variation on oral sex. Sucking cock and eating pussy
were once perceived as more intimate than penetrative sex. Now the acts are relatively
mundane: A significant portion of today's teens practice deep-throating before
losing their virginity. A 2002 survey conducted by the National Center for Health Statistics found that for most Americans, vaginal sex was more common than oral, with one
notable exception: Fifty percent of teens aged 15 to 19 had engaged in vaginal
sex, while 55 percent had given oral a try.

Of course, gays had prioritized
oral in the bedroom long before straights relaxed their attitudes (and their
jaws). A 2011 study found that 75 percent of gay
men had performed fellatio in their most recent sexual encounter, while only 34
percent had penetrated his partner. Oral sex was so popular it barely edged out
kissing on the mouth. These days it's anal sex that's
following a similar trajectory from the gay to the straight bedroom. In 1992, only
16 percent of women aged 18-24 had tried it. Twenty years later, there's been a
great shift: 40 percent of women from that same age bracket said they'd taken it in the butt at least once in 2010.

The
straight man who continues along the path paved by his gay brethren might well
be ahead of the curve. According to Jeff, a 27-year-old who's into butt play (he
prefers fingers), it's "a pleasant surprise" for partners when they realize
"interplay isn't always going to be set-up, mount, dismount." Some ladies even
view his predilection as a badge of masculinity. "You can talk about being
tough and fearless and open and sensitive, but nothing puts that to the test
like allowing—and enjoying—foreign objects in the out door."

Women
agree that the act can change the way they think about their man—for the
better. L.A. writer Tracy Jeanne Rosenthal captures
feelings of empowerment through rimming in a poem recently published by Sibling Rivalry Press. "[T]his morning I called my
boyfriend my boyfriend for the first time, right after I flipped this boyfriend
on his belly, backed his ass into my face, rimmed him with the effort of my
entire body and have never felt so butch." And when Lily, a 26-year-old Brooklyn
woman, revealed at a dinner party that her boyfriend loved a little tongue in
his ass, "Someone asked, 'Did you think that he was perhaps gay?'" She replied,
"No, I thought he was perhaps human."

Rebranding
a typically gay sex act as acceptable for straights could help normalize gay
people themselves, particularly in places where gay sex is still deeply stigmatized.
When the Ugandan evangelical pastor Martin Ssempa launched a Rick Warren-aided
and Michele Bachmann-approved anti-gay campaign there in 2011, his propaganda zeroed
in on the horror of ass-to-mouth stimulation. "I've taken some time to do a
little research to know what homosexuals do in the privacy of their bedrooms,"
he says in a videotaped speech that's
so offensive it rises to the level of viral comedy. "One of the things they do
is called 'anal licking,' where a man's anus is licked like this, by the other
person," he adds while cupping his left hand into a circle and smacking his
lips against it. "Poo poo comes out, and then the poo poo's out, and then they
eat the poo poo." (Though Ssempa claims to be disgusted by the results of his
gay "research," his literally shit-eating grin says otherwise). "We want to ask
Barack Obama to explain to us: Is this what he wants to bring to Africa?" he
continues. The "first gay president" remains closed-lipped on the topic, advancing
the gay agenda through marriage equality and open military—as opposed to anal—service.
For a post-Clinton presidency, such a stance
could be considered regressive. Blamed for popularizing oral sex when reports
surfaced that Monica Lewinsky sampled his cigar in the Oval Office, Clinton's
proclivities went even further south. Another detail buried in the Starr
Report: Monica totally rimmed him, too.

But
part of the problem is that, outside of gay contexts (and apparently, presidential
investigations and Esquire sex
surveys), the topic of rimming is rarely breached—even in the clinical literature
of science or the lewd output of Hollywood. The National Survey of Sexual
Health and Behavior, conducted by Indiana University sex researchers,
delved into the rate of anal penetration of women and gay men in 2010, but it didn't
question the straight man's asshole. Pop culture similarly ignoresthe act. When Sex and the City
brought analingus chitchat to the brunch table in 2001, Miranda said she
accepted one guy's tongue up her butt, but she recoiled when the roles were
reversed. Even Samantha's lips were sealed. We've seen Lena Dunham engage in
some highly uncomfortable anal sex on Girls, but
she's yet to eat out Adam's ass (season three maybe?). In this summer's apocalyptic
bro-comedy, This Is The End, rimming was relegated
to a gross-out gag: At a coke-fueled party, Jay Baruchel walks in on Michael
Cera, who is sipping Capri Sun while a girl goes at him from behind. "Is Michael Cera's butthole as adorable as I pictured?" Seth
Rogen later asks Baruchel. "I picture it looking like a little donut. A little
pink sprinkled donut."

But the Hollywood anus is carefully sheathed behind nudity clauses, and even in
straight porn, males don't spread their cheeks outside of niche sites. The
industry's most attention-seeking asshole belongs to Rocco Siffredi, the
boundary-pushing Italian who mastered the art of the 180-degree-turn mid-blow
job. But as the poster boy for porn's "gonzo" trend—which sent the sexually enflamed
Siffredi punching stomachs, pissing on tummies and sitting atop the faces of
women across the continent in the 1990s and 2000s—he might have done more to
exoticize the practice than popularize it among American viewers. (The
takeaway? Don't try this at home.)

For the layman, logistics remain
an obstacle. "There's a reason we say 'where the sun don't shine,'" Glickman
says. "If you're a woman having sex doggy-style, your ass is exposed, but that's
not a position that men are typically in." The ideal analingus position puts a
man "on his back with his knees pulled up to his chest." Or: "Standing on the
floor and bent over the end of the bed." Or: "On his elbows and knees." Says
Glickman, "It can feel like a vulnerable thing."

And some straight men—unaccustomed
to grooming the area—are understandably nervous about how that intimate zone
will present, up close and personal. "I wasn't gonna get the real, in-there,
good butt stuff unless I showered," Brian submits. Hygiene is a legitimate
concern. Along with the standard set of STIs transmitted through oral-genital
contact, rimming carries a small, but real, risk of intestinal parasites, according to the CDC. (How many people have
actually had to seek pharmaceutical remedies after a rim job is unclear.) Gays
have already figured out a solution: "Fucking around and hopping in the shower
together is not a weird interlude," Michael says—it's a sexy one.

But
for many people, "Disgust factors heavily when it comes to sex," says Jesse
Bering, author of the new book Perv: The Sexual Deviant in All of Us. While some women can get over the gross-out factor when hygiene
is controlled for, "You never know how they're going to react" to a rim-job
request, Brian says. "Someone could be like, 'Oh my God, that's disgusting.'"

Dior,
a 28-year-old straight woman from New York City, is that somebody. She says that
it's normal for men to attempt to rim her while attending to other business in the
area. ("Sometimes there's just a tongue near your butt.") But recently, "I've
noticed that more and more dudes are asking for them," she says. "Particularly
the older dudes I've slept with." She always politely declines the opportunity.
"For one, they are never, like, boyfriends. And two: Butts are gross! Get a
wife who will do that for you."

In her mind rimming is best served by straight women in the context of a committed relationship. The only bruncher on Sex and the City who admitted to ass munching was
buttoned-up Charlotte, who performed the act on her husband. Even Dan Savage's "Eight Rules for Rimming" include the directive:
"Don't rim on the first date." Straight men hoping to receive keep their overtures
subtle until they suspect that their partners are game. "I will do a little
arching and nuzzling," Jeff says. "Like when you want your back rubbed." Brian
will wait until the stage of a relationship where his partner has a sense of
"my weirdness" before even suggesting she approach the rim. And even then,
finding a woman capable of getting the job done is sometimes a shot in the
dark. "It's just like any other mouth stuff," Brian says. "You gotta own it.
You gotta go for it." Some women "will oblige for a little bit, and then they're
done. They're like, 'I'm just going to go back to sucking your dick, because
that's something I'm comfortable with.'"

So until the rest of the country opens up, these
few, proud straight men will keep arching, nuzzling and shyly inquiring in the
pursuit of pleasure. "I'm only in the meat body for
so long," Brian says. "Whatever is going to give this spirit the best
experience on Earth, I'm taking it. You know?"